Posted: February 5, 2020
“It’s a marathon, not a sprint.”
At some point, it’s likely that you’ve heard this saying or some version of it. The point is to convince you to focus on the long-term results and not burn out too early.
Digital marketing is the perfect example of this.
Sure, you can buy followers and emails and pay for clicks. There are quick and easy ways to cheat your way to the metrics you are looking for. But the result will never be as good as when you achieve those numbers organically and through hard work.
If you haven’t created a digital marketing strategy before or are considering working with an agency, here are a few important lessons to keep in mind so that you know what to expect and when:
1. Growth Takes Time: Any agency or digital marketer who promises you instant results will not be using best practices to do so. Even if you didn’t have a digital presence before, it will take more than a couple of days or weeks to begin building a following, seeing traffic headed to your website, or leads engaging with your ads. It's important to note that while it does take time to see growth, there should at least be an upward trajectory.
2. Stick with Best Practices: It can be tempting to want to see lots of followers and likes on your social media content, or lots of contacts in your CRM database. The easiest way to do that is to buy followers or email databases. To that, we draw a hard line in the sand and say, “SHAME.” Buying email contacts and followers has a short-lived thrill but inevitably leads to disappointment when you have a super low engagement rate because none of your followers or CRM contacts actually engage with your content and brand. Half of those email addresses you bought could be out of service and 90% of those followers you purchased are probably bots.
3. Build It and They Will Come: Another misconception is that immediately executing a content marketing strategy will result in high traffic counts and higher sales. Hold your horses there, pal. Content marketing is all a part of the long game. One blog post isn’t going to convert leads. Building up consistent social media posts, interacting with followers, posting blogs on a frequent and consistent basis, and sending out emails that have value to leads and customers all build together into a momentum that will build your digital marketing strategy towards its results. So while that one blog post or tweet may not seem all that important, putting them all together builds your authority in the digital sphere, and makes it easier for leads to interact and connect with your brand.
4. Just Keep Creating: The first few weeks and months will be tough, because you'll (hopefully) be consistently creating content and sharing it, but the metrics and engagement most likely won't be very high. And that's okay: Just. Keep. Creating. Use this time with a smaller audience to hone in on your brand voice, figure out what topics and types of content resonate most with a small audience and with your brand, and get used to building content calendars and publishing on a consistent schedule. Eventually, as you get into the rhythm of it, your outreach efforts will begin to pay off.
As long as you keep building and improving upon your digital marketing strategy, reviewing the analytics and pivoting when it makes sense, over the long-term you will see growth in engagement, which will improve your bottom line as well. And that's the whole point of marketing, right?